EDITORIAL. 
States, we should, had the war continued, been able, by June of this 
year, to produce about 2,000,000 cubic feet of this gas per month for 
use in our balloons at the Front. This would have meant the creation 
of a great industry in Canada. Although it will not pay to use the gas 
for balloons under peace activities, every effort is being made to develop 
technical uses for this gas, and it is possible that it may yet be required 
in large quantities for the production of gasfilled lamps and other 
articles of commerce.” Further investigating and experimenting have 
led to the confident prediction that helium will soon be included among 
the valuable commercial products of the Dominion. Incidentally, this 
is a tribute to the work of scientific and industrial investigations now 
being conducted in Canada.—(Chemical News.) 
RESEARCH. 
Speaking at a conference of representatives of research organizations 
connected with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research 
at the Institution of Civil Engineers recently, the Right Hon. A. 
J. Balfour said it was evident that the industrial progress of mankind 
in the near future would more and more depend upon the alliance of 
science and industry and upon the co-operation of different branches of 
science with each other. “The great industrial development in which 
Great Britain led the way towards the end of the eighteenth century— 
that gave her a manufacturing supremacy over the world, which it is 
certainly impossible, and probably not wholly desirable, that we should 
ever regain—was not in the main due to anything which pure science 
contributed to industry, and he believed that it was partly owing to the 
fact that the great industrial community of this country failed to see as 
fully as was desirable that science was an essential element in industrial 
progress. The Germans, whose industrial development came much later, 
took a different view. He did not think that they showed any greater 
aptitude for science than Britons; but, beginning, as they did, rather 
late in the day, with their great powers of governmental organization, 
with their highly developed and equipped universities, and with the 
view which they had always entertained of the close alliance that ought 
to exist between knowledge and power, they naturally and easily did 
what we, with more difficulty and at a later date, were beginning to do. 
They saw how close was this co-operation, how absolutely necessary it 
was, not merely in the competition of people with people, of industry 
with industry, but they recognised, too, that it was only upon our 
increasing knowledge of the powers of nature that we could expect to 
improve the material lot of man. The thing, continued Mr. Balfour, 
which was really going to make a difference in the future, ‘to make the 
remainder of the twentieth century different from the nineteenth century 
and the twenty-first century different from the twentieth, was the com- 
mand, for industrial purposes, which man had over the forces of nature. 
That could only be attained, in the first place, by the cultivation of 
pure science, of science for itself, of knowledge for its own sake. It 
could only be if we strove to breed and to edutate men who, without any 
thought of self-advancement, were consumed by a curiosity to know, 
and, that end having been attained, then to learn how to apply the 
knowledge which they had disinterestedly acquired to the great purposes 
of industrial development. 
C.2007—3, ~ 81 
